Two explanations of Nietzsche's Concept of Eternal Recurrence

“Those who criticize without creating are the plague of philosophy.” - Gilles Deleuze

1.  A transcript of Michael Sugrue's Youtube video about Nietzsche:

Nietzsche, unlike the other intellectuals in the late 19th century, sees the implications of the collapse of religion. Rather than thinking that we could be sustained by naive, Darwinian belief in progress, he says “there's no progress to have.” Whatever we do, happens next – it doesn't mean that it's progressing. It's not going in any direction – it's all random. “The world is in all eternity Chaos. All hymns have sung to the teeming Chaos.”

Chaos in the Greek tradition is compared to Cosmos.  A Cosmos is an ordered universe; Chaos is a disordered universe. Cosmos is knowable; Chaos is not.

Once we've killed God, we've also destroyed knowledge, which means science is dead, philosophy is dead – our whole intellectual tradition has suffered an earthquake-like disaster. Nietzsche asks, what do we do now? How would we be big enough? How will we be strong enough to create a culture? To create a an intellectual life, when everything that we depended on, is now gone for good? ...

...Nietzsche’s madman is the one who announces that “God is dead.” He goes to the churches and he sees the people are going through the motions, but don't believe this anymore.
He talks to other people who have given up on religion, and the madman says “don't you realize how catastrophic this is?” “That everything is now tumbling down around our heads?”
He describes it as falling in every direction at once – imagine being in inter-stellar space – no up, no down, no front, no back. Where are we? What are we? All of this is up for grabs now. That's what the death of God is.

Since the Christian God is now dead, he's not kidding when he thinks "I can replace that."  If Christianity was a human construction, and if we need something to fill in the gap, Nietzsche is willing to step up and give us his best shot.
This is what he does when he says “Dionysus versus the Crucified.” The Greek god Dionysus – the god of wine, the god of drama, the god of intoxication, the god of sexual desire, the god of irrationality – is Nietzsche’s Nom de Plume. It's the mask that he uses to say “I have a new religion for you.” “I'm going to revive the religion of Dionysus,” because the status that Rationality previously held, can no longer hold. He thinks Christianity is dead, so he's trying to offer us some way out of this Labyrinth.

Hegel said that the highest achievements of human beings are three things: art, religion, and philosophy. Nietzsche believes that he has shown quite conclusively that religion and philosophy are gone. They're dead, and that leaves only art. Nietzsche is going to create a philosophy of culture which says art is the only way out of the Labyrinth; we must construct life-giving illusions that will connect art to religion–art to our longing for coherence–and which will prevent us from being destroyed and torn apart by the vacuum of meaning that emerges after God dies. 
Christians used to call someone the Antichrist as a kind of ultimate insult. Nietzsche says “No, we really need an Antichrist now!” and “I'm the only one that could do it, because I'm the only one who really understands how deep our problems run.” 

So Dionysus is going to be a religious and artistic alternative to both science and to Christianity. For example, he says look in the past. Judges who believed in witchcraft accused ‘witches’ and condemned them to death on that basis. Nietzsche says, “Now, not only is there no witchcraft, but now there's no Justice either." The guilt that both the witches and the their accusers thought they were bearing doesn't exist, because there aren't any moral or immoral boundaries anymore. Witchcraft and the belief in moral guilt are equally superstitious.

The only way to renew our culture is to find some solace in art. It's art that is going to take up the redemptive qualities that religion used to offer us. Nietzsche says that he is an artist, and that's the only way the philosophy can be done now–artistically.

Instead of writing long treatises like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Nietzsche writes small, poetic aphorisms. The lack of systematic wholeness of his works reflects the lack of systematic wholeness in the universe. Cosmos, you can write a treatise about; but Chaos, you can only have this idea about, that idea about, try this on, and see how this works. Everything is tentative; everything is provisional... In other words, Knowledge is done. What do we do in the absence of knowledge? We find some way of reconciling ourselves to a completely meaningless world. That's what “The world is in all eternity, Chaos” means. He is the philosopher of Chaos, he is the prophet of Chaos, he speaks on behalf of Chaos.

Nietzsche says maybe we can get a foothold on the world by imagining that everything repeats itself. He calls this the Eternal Recurrence.
Possibly, we can give some meaning and some stability to the choices we make in life, on the basis that “Whatever we choose, we choose forever.” “We will be reconstituted at some infinitely distant time from now, and we will be forced to live the same life.” If you choose an inferior life, then you will live in that inferior condition forever–you are stuck in an endless repetition. 

2. A transcript of Plastic Pill's (subscriber only) video "Deleuze on Nietzsche: Video Supplement" 

[Nietzsche’s character] Zarathustra plays dice with the gods. The dice throw is seen as an analogy for Deleuze, as the affirmation of becoming. So you see what number comes up, and this is immediately anti-Hegelian, because it includes pure chance and the affirmation of pure chance.

…

The whole point of pure difference is that there are not really superiors and lessers.  Because if you're if you take an affirmative view, if you affirm everything, if you roll the dice and you affirm all becoming, then you can't you can't put yourself in a position outside of difference in order to judge it. You don't get to be the judge; you don't get to be the moralizer; you don't get to be the arbiter. That's not what philosophy is.

…

The eternal return is fantastic in Deleuze’s interpretation. People do not understand it. Like in the movie True Detective, “time is a flat circle and everything comes back”–this is so misunderstood.  The eternal return is not just a thought experiment first of all, and it's not that the same state of affairs keeps coming back. 

Do you know the snake eating its own tail, the ouroboros? That's the symbol of this eternal return. But it's not that you keep living the same life over and over again, it's not the things that return. Everything is a river, and the river's never the same. You can't have the same river more than once. Nietzsche says this actually twice in Zarathustra. He says “imagine willing the same thing over and over again.” The thing that is willed is Return. Not the state of affairs returning, but the Return itself–the dice roll. So the Eternal Return is just to continually affirm returning–that the dice roll happens over and over… The thing that is most individual about processes, is the Eternal Return of that process. So it's not just that thought experiment in Zarathustra:

And there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh must return to you all in the same succession and sequence. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again and you with it, speck of dust. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you have answered him “You are a god, and never have i heard anything more divine.”

So the point of this is not that the state of affairs itself repeats, but that the Return repeats. In Deleuze’s interpretation, there’s a double selection: first there's the selection of willing, when the demon asks “do you want this again?” If you will the Return, then only that which becomes is the thing that can return.  “There will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh must return to you.” So do you affirm existence? Every roll of the dice that has ever happened. Or do you say, “no, I can't live this life anymore.” 

Because if you want it to end, the denial, you can have that. You have that with your Christianity–“a little poison now and then makes for pleasant dreams.” You have that with your philosophy–saying “no I know what ‘the Right’ is, and that ‘Right’ will stop changing.” You can see this even in like leftist politics “If we only got there.” But there is no ‘there’. If you think there's a purposive end, then you're not living the eternal return. The eternal return is the affirmation of the return of everything, always–even the stuff that's painful. Nietzsche says twice in Zarathustra, it's not the same state of affairs that returns. Becoming is eternal. Becoming–not history. Becoming is the part that's eternal, not the history, not the states of events. You will the returning of becoming–temporality without ends in it. 

The negation destroys the returning. It represents the returning as having been destroyed, because there's a finishing point–we can be done with it. “If we only had this!” 

The over man in nature the superman is the one who just says “Yes, everything will return; I am that! I am that returning.” 

…

So for Deleuze, the will to power is not wanting, coveting, or seeking power, but only creating–and creation has to always happen over and over again. You can't defend the vanished concept, not even your own concept, not even your self conception. 

“To cast the dice is to remove from thought the questions of truth and falsity.” 

Osho on Jesus

Abridged from: https://www.oshoteachings.com/osho-jesus-sacrifie-cross-salvation/

"THE FIRST THING TO BE UNDERSTOOD about a man like Jesus is that whatsoever the church that is bound to grow around such a man says about him, it is bound to be wrong. What the Christian church says about Christ cannot be true. In fact the Christian priest does not represent Christ at all. He is the same old rabbi in new garments, the same old rabbi who was responsible for Jesus murder...

"Jesus is a rebel, just as Buddha is or Lao Tzu is. When the church starts establishing itself it starts destroying the rebelliousness of Jesus, Buddha, because rebellion cannot go with an establishment. It starts imposing its own ideas — once Jesus is gone it is very easy to impose your own ideas. It starts selecting what to keep in the Bible and what not to keep. Many things have been dropped, many things have not been included in it. 

...

"I don’t know Jesus through Christian theology; I know him directly. And my knowing is that he cannot talk in terms of sacrifice — first thing, the very first. A man like Jesus does not talk in terms of sacrifice; it is celebration, not sacrifice. He is going to meet his God dancing, singing. It is not sacrifice; he is not a martyr. The Christian church tries to make him the greatest martyr, the greatest man who has sacrificed himself for the salvation of the world from the sins of man. In the first place it is not sacrifice — sacrifice looks business-like — it is celebration! Jesus is celebrating his life and his death.

"Secondly: nobody can solve the problems of others, nobody can be the salvation of the world. And you can see it: the world is still the same. Twenty centuries have passed and Christian priests go on talking nonsense, that he sacrificed himself for the salvation of the world. But where is the salvation of the world? Either he failed, he could not manage… that they cannot accept, that he failed. Then what happened? The world seems to be exactly the same — nothing has changed! Humanity remains in the same misery. But Jesus cannot have said, I have come for the salvation of the world.

...

"There is no need for ANY salvation. If there is any need you feel, it can’t be done by anybody else except you yourself. You are not living in sin; you are living in nature — but if nature is condemned you start feeling guilty. And that is the trade-secret of the priests: to make you feel guilty.

"I don’t think Jesus said that his sacrifice on the cross was for the salvation of the world from the sins of man. Priests must have imposed their ideas on Jesus. The New Testament was written centuries afterwards, and then for centuries it was edited, changed, and the words that Jesus spoke were in a language which is no more alive — Aramaic. It was not even Hebrew — a dialect of Hebrew, but different in many ways.

"When Jesus’ words were translated — first into Latin — a great change happened: they lost their original quality, the flavor. They lost something very essential: their soul. And when from Latin they were translated into English, something was again lost. For example, a few words you can meditate over: ‘Repentance’ is one of the key words because Jesus uses it again and again, says to his disciples: Repent! Repent ye, because the Day of Judgment is very close. He repeats it so many times that it must have been of tremendous value to him. But what does it mean — ‘repent’? Ask the Christian priest; he will say, “This is a simple word; everybody knows what it means: repent for your sins, repent for your guilt, repent for all that you have done.” And the priest can be helpful; he can help you in the ways of repentance. But the word ‘repent’ has nothing to do with repentance.

"Jesus’ word for repent simply means ‘return’; it does not mean repentance at all. ‘Turn in’ it means, ‘return to the source’, it means, ‘return to your own being’. That’s what meditation is all about: returning to the source, returning to the center of the cyclone, returning to your very being.

"Now you can see the difference. When you use the English word ‘repent’ it has something very ugly about it: sin, guilt, the priest, confession; this is the climate of the English word ‘repent’. But the Aramaic word simply means return to the source, return! Return, don’t waste time. And that’s how it is with almost all key words.

"It is almost impossible to understand Jesus through the priests. The only pure way, the only possible way, is to go in, return inside. There you will meet Christ-consciousness. The only way to understand Christ is to become a Christ. Never be a Christian — be a Christ! Never be a Buddhist — be a Buddha! Never be a Hindu — be a Krishna! Beware of the priests. They are the people who crucified Jesus — how can they interpret Jesus? If you want to be a Krishna, Christ or Buddha, then you need not go into the scriptures and you need not ask the scholars: you will have to ask the mystics how to go in."

Abridged from: https://www.oshoteachings.com/osho-jesus-sacrifie-cross-salvation/

Osho on Jesus's Crucifixion

Excerpt from https://www.osho.com/osho-online-library/osho-talks/jesus-presence-the-present-821ceafd-617?p=19476a7b858f5865c13a427a2616f152

There were two thieves who were crucified with Jesus: one was on his left side, the other was on his right side. You may not have ever thought of it as a tremendously significant symbol that Jesus represents the present moment. One thief is the past, the other thief is the future, and Jesus represents the present moment - closest to God, closest to essence. 

One thief mocked Jesus - the past always mocks you; he condemned Jesus - the past always condemns you. The other thief asked Jesus about the future, 'What will happen after death? Will I be able to see you in heaven?' One is past, the other is future, and Jesus is just sandwiched between these two thieves. 

And why call them thieves? Past is a thief, future is a thief, because they go on stealing your present. They are thieves. To me this is a parable. 

Jesus is present, herenow, closest to the essence, just ready to die and disappear from the body and the mind. He hesitates a little bit -everybody hesitates. When you come to the present and you will see eternity facing you -no past, no future, but eternity - a totally different dimension. Past, present, future are horizontal; eternity is vertical. Again, to me the cross is the symbol of these two lines crossing. 

A cross is made of two lines - one horizontal, the other vertical. This is a representation of time and eternity. Everybody hesitates when facing eternity, nowhereness, nothingness or all-ness. It is so much, one is going to disappear into it like a drop. And the ocean is so big, one will not be found again. Even a dewdrop falling into the ocean from a grass leaf hesitates. 

Jesus hesitated, and I love this man because he hesitated. His hesitation shows that he was human. His hesitation shows that he belonged to us - he was son of man. He cried to God, 'Have you forsaken me?'  'What are you doing to me? Have you abandoned me? Are you no more with me? I am disappearing and I don't see your hands protecting me' - the dewdrop is falling in the ocean - 'Where are you? I am falling into a deep nothingness. Death has arrived, and I had always hoped that in death you would be there waiting and you would embrace me, you would take me in your fold, you would be warm and loving. But where are you? Have you forsaken me? Have you abandoned me? I don't see you anywhere.'

It is very human - the life of Jesus is very human - and that is the beauty of it, that's why it has impressed so many people. His very humanity is touching. But then he saw the point: he must have looked deep into the eternity, the nothingness, he must have seen the point that 'God cannot have a human face, this is his face,' that 'God cannot have human hands,' that 'This nothingness is ready to embrace me, to take me deep into its heart.' And then he said to God, 'Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. So, be it so, let it be so. So you are nothingness: I am ready, I trust you. I will trust even your nothingness.'

Education class reflection (2007)

This is a papaer I wrote in 2007 in a course that I failed. I was taking 18 hours when I probably should have only taken 12 or 13, and all the course assignments had very specific rubrics on how it would be graded with what seemed to me were meaningless guidelines, so I would ignore the rubric and try to complete the "spirit" of the assignment, instead. Like I said, I failed the course, but damn I love this essay I wrote for the final class assignment!

Reflection about Education


Think about the difference between volunteer work and having a job within a corporate system. If you’re the cashier at Walmart, the more machine-like you are, the better. The important thing is to check items out quickly and accurately, to “complete your duties efficiently.” Your attitude toward customers is not the primary priority. But if you’re volunteering at say feeding the homeless, interaction with people is the important thing. (Unless, they are starving are something, which is very rare in America.) A machine-like volunteer would bring no joy to the lives of those you are serving, and thus misses the entire point of volunteer work, of public service. Corporate work benefits from a machine-like approach; public service benefits from a human-like approach.


In his book How to Survive in Your Native Land, recounting his experiences teaching in a public middle school, James Herndon provides a powerful illustration of the difference between truly internally motivated student activities, and what teachers assume to be internally motivated participation. He describes how kids in his regular class enjoyed the creative tasks he came up for them to do: the “uproar when twenty kids rushed to the board to put up their symbols” when the class was creating a Hieroglyphics-like language, getting information about how the Peace Corps operates and then writing “imaginary journals of stays in Africa and South America.” Then, once, he and a colleague started a new class, without grades, and in which students were issued “permanent hall passes,” making attendance completely optional. They soon found that students didn’t want to participate in these creative tasks. “We had to face the fact that all the stuff we thought the kids were dying to do (if they only had time away from the stupefying lessons of other teachers) was in fact stuff that we wanted them to do, that we invented. … And not only things to be doing—it was things for them, the kids, to be doing. … We wanted to see what symbols the kids would invent for English words; we didn’t have much curiosity about the symbols we ourselves would invent. We didn’t write fake Peace Corps journals ourselves; we only told the kids to do it.”


Herndon then describes the successful activity of that class. He and his colleague decided to make a film, but one that they wanted to make. “We didn’t want to find out what the kids’ notions of films were. We didn’t want to see what they would do with the film. We didn’t want to inspect their creativity.”


“If … the role of teacher as giver of orders didn’t work out, it was also true that the other role (the one Frank and I had imagined)—the teacher as Provider Of Things To Do, the teacher as Entertainer—didn’t work our either. For wasn’t that just what the kids had been telling us all year in their oblique, exasperating way? What did all that Nothing To Do In Here mean, if not that the kids didn’t want entertainers, wouldn’t accept them if they didn't have to, wanted the teachers to be something else entirely?


“Wanted them to be what? What was the difference between all the grand things we’d thought up for the kids to do and The Hawk? Why, merely that we didn’t want to do any of the former ourselves and we did want to do the latter.”… “Wanted them to be human.”

Later, Herndon spells out his central message to teachers:
“Resist every day all the apparatus of the school which was created in order to enable you to manage and evaluate a group, since it is just that management which destroyed the kids you have in your class.


“You must examine your authority for what it is, and abandon that part of it which is official, board-appointed, credentialed and dead. Then you must accept the natural authority you have as an adult, belonging to a community of adults which includes the kid’s parents and relatives.”


So Herndon tells us to resist “all the apparatus of the school which was created in order to enable you to manage and evaluate a group.” But be aware that the apparatus serves a useful function. For bad teachers, and we should admit there are bad teachers, the apparatus is a necessary “safety net” that gives at least some sort of direction to the class. But that’s all it is: a safety net! If we’re trying to teach students to do more than crawl, we must “resist the apparatus”, rise above the safety net, and use only the “natural authority you have as an adult.” So don’t use grades to get behavior out of students, (but I do believe grades have a useful function of allocating scholarship opportunities to those who most want them), and don’t give out praise to students just for doing what’s expected of them (how weird would it be if we treated our friends that way? “Good job coming to dinner with me tonight, Steve!”). Resist that artificial authority; only use it as a safety net when you feel overwhelmed from being the only adult in a class full of kids.


This is such an important idea for teachers to understand: Authority from being a teacher is a good safety net, but should be resisted. Our authority from being an adult is in fact much more real, and much more powerful.


So which approach should a teacher take? Should teaching be approached like any other corporate job? Or should it be approached more like a public service? From what I can tell, the education department here favors the corporate model of teaching. We’re encouraged to use rubrics, “behavioral objectives”, and grades to get students to efficiently carry out the assignments we give them.


I love the idea of teaching; I want to teach, at least on and off, many years down the road from now. But I’m not satisfied with the experience I have had in this department. This is now my senior year, and it’s not at all been what I hoped it would be. To me, teaching is about more than getting students to understand the content of a subject. To me, teaching is about impacting the lives of students, about initiating them into society, about teaching them to be good members of a community. When I think of a good teacher, I have always thought of Socrates. (Jesus or the Buddha were also a teachers, but I understand it’s best not to go that direction. ) It seems to me, though, in this department we’re not learning how to be teachers. We’re learning how to train corporate workers. …to get students to carry out their tasks accurately and efficiently. I believe in public education. If I teach, I want to teach in public schools. That’s where the need is, right? I understand the value of everything we have covered in this class, and appreciate being made aware about all of it, but I don’t agree with being required to fill out all these lesson plans and content assessment projects. Don’t all the physics classes I have taken test whether I know the content or not? To properly teach physics in high school isn’t so much about getting students to understand specific concepts; most of them won’t become physicists anyway. Rather it’s about explaining the role physics has in our society, and about initiating them somewhat into that culture of physics, so that students will be able to decide whether or not they are interested in pursuing the subject as a possible career.

I don’t think being able to fill out a unit plan reflects my ability to be a high school physics teacher. Being a high school teacher should focus primarily on building a strong sense of classroom community, initiating students into the cultures of different career paths, and only then, on having successful lesson plans that give students every opportunity to succeed on that path if their interest leads them there. For me at least, putting the primary focus on producing excellent lesson plans for all students, whether they are really interested in the subject or not, deadens what the idea of teaching is all about. Rather than impacting the lives and choices of students, teaching is reduced to either giving students orders or an entertaining them. Either training corporate workers or simply providing students with things to do.

Does Tori Amos's 'Crucify' Mirror William Blake's Reworking of Christian Theology?

There are striking similarity's between Tori Amos's song Crucify and William Blake's re-working of Christian theology in his poem The Everlasting Gospel.  In fact, William Butler Yeats' commentary on Blake's poem can just as easily be used to explain Crucify's lyrics!  The following is color coded with Tori Amos in blue, Blake in red, and Yeats in green.

Every finger in the room
Is pointing at me

 Accusation is the great mental sin. Other sin is merely physical, and belongs to the things of Time that pass.  

I wanna spit in their faces
Then I get afraid of what that could bring
I got a bowling ball in my stomach
I got a desert in my mouth
Figures that my courage would choose to sell out now

Healthy Satanic pride in the energy of that lower part of mind, called body, has also a right to its elation because "everything that lives is Holy." 

I've been looking for a savior in these dirty streets
Looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets

Lust is fire. It is also the basis of our human imagination which develops from it. Thus lust, seeking to destroy mind and make body everything, unites the sexes bodily, consumes their separateness, and is the basis of that union which is the entrance of mankind into the state called Man. In other words, it is the destruction of the dust, type of separateness, and the release of the Image of God from that dust by the Breath Divine that moved on the waters and made them the source of Unity in the infinitely divided.

I've been raising up my hands
Drive another nail in
Just what God needs
One more victim

Humility is only doubt, 
And does the sun and moon blot out, 
Roofing over with thorns and stems 
The buried soul and all its gems.  

Why do we
Crucify ourselves
Every day
I crucify myself

Christ's two natures impelled Him to crucifixion. He went to "humble Himself to God," and also to proudly destroy the serpent in himself; his own spectre, or Satan. This Satan is the false (view of) Christ, worshiped still...  This Serpent, Satan, was what was nailed to the tree. This body was destroyed or devoured in three days. This devouring is the meaning of the serpent with his tail in his mouth. Christ's self-sacrifice (or suicide) was the thrusting into death of Satan, and who had become Himself as a result of the Incarnation. 

Nothing I do is good enough for you
Crucify myself
Every day
I crucify myself
And my heart is sick of being
I said my heart is sick of being in
Chains, oh oh oh
Chains, oh oh oh

Satan is not only the moral accuser but the denier of Imaginative truth, for he would have Reason and Memory only considered to be intellectual attributes. With these he builds the dark fiction of error — a belief in that delusive Goddess Nature, who is the mother of physical morality, and of mental immorality... [Christ's Crucifixion] was the eternal putting-off of Reason and Memory and Morality as delusions, that Imagination, Eternal Present, and Forgiveness might survive.

Got a kick for a dog
Begging for love
I gotta have my suffering
So that I can have my cross

Jehovah, in the persons of the Elohim, and by the agency of the Angel of the Divine Presence, created this dark world as an act of mercy and of cruelty. It is of mercy because it enables the weak emotions to look through symbols upon prophecy, and also because it passes away, being under Time. It is of cruelty because it cuts off joys of mind and adds on pains of mind — of that lower and shrunken part called body. 

I know a cat named Easter
He says, "Will you ever learn?
You're just an empty cage girl if you kill the bird"

The Image of God in which man was made is the form of the Imagination. This is common to all men and will end by becoming One Form. It will unite all. It will survive all. It will redeem all, saving them from violation or experience and the slavery of belief in nature, in accusation, and in the mental permanence of sin. In a word it saves them from Satan, God of this world. Reason and memory tend also to unite men's personalities into one great Temporary Delusion. This is the great Satan, opposite of the great Saviour. It is negative, imagination only being positive.

Got enough guilt to start
My own religion

To this hour, Satan also, himself the type of Christ by being Christ's mental opposite, tempts man to lust that he may accuse him, restrain him, make him take morality for religion, and so absorb him in the delusions of Nature and live in his absorption.  

Please
Save me
I cry

But the Divine element in man does not leave him when he enters into lust, but accompanies his three regions of Head, Heart, and Loins, as the Form of the Fourth accompanied the three men in the furnace. It takes Man in all men into this vegetable fire, and comes out of it with him. Satan also sacrifices himself in the vain attempt to sacrifice others to himself. So he also becomes a Redeemer while still the contrary of the great Self-Sacrificer, and his suicide, with its evil intent, complements the good suicide of the crucifixion. This latter suicide began when God allowed his Image to be of two sexes, and when "Male and Female created he them," whose name was called " Adam " — red earth.

Where are those angels
When you need them

Thou Angel of the Presence Divine,

That didst create this body of mine,

Wherefore hast thou writ these laws

And created Hell's dark jaws ?